


The Ace Up His Sleeve

by alianora



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Asexuality, F/M, Gen, asexuality doesnt mean you're broken STEVE, my first fic in 3 years im panicking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-20 05:15:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10655664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alianora/pseuds/alianora
Summary: Picturing girls you didn’t even know naked was...disrespectful. Picturing girls you did knew naked..that was much worse. Steve had always figured Bucky was just oversexed, and that most guys were more like Steve himself.





	The Ace Up His Sleeve

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Geese_In_Flight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geese_In_Flight/gifts).



He hadn't really thought about it in detail before.

 

Before the serum, he was way too scrawny, too poor, and too busy dealing with the shit show that was his life back then. He had always figured that once things were more stable - when he had a steady job and wasn't dying of pneumonia or dealing with his mom's death or trying to con his way into the army - that he would find a nice girl, convince her to put up with Bucky being constantly underfoot, and marry her.

 

Isn't that what most guys wanted? Sure, Steve had never even kissed a girl (he had kissed Bucky on the mouth once, but that was a dare that led to Bucky shoving Steve into a snowbank), and he didn't spend nearly as much time as Bucky did thinking about what girls looked like naked. Picturing girls you didn’t even know naked was...disrespectful. Picturing girls you did knew naked..that was much worse. Steve had always figured Bucky was just oversexed, and that most guys were more like Steve himself. 

 

After the serum, he was kept busy being a performing monkey for the Army. He was always surrounded by the USO gals, which made him more than a little nervous. Some of them flirted and some did more, but he never found himself looking at any of them like _that_. Not even after repeatedly walking in on them when they were changing after the Army kept cheaping out of providing two dressing rooms. He mostly tried to keep his eyes closed or his back turned while some of the girls ignored him, some teased him, and some flirted outrageously with him. He learned far more about female biology than he was ever comfortable with - a point of great amusement for Lucy and Suz was how hard they could make him blush by discussing bathing habits.

 

They were pretty and had long legs and were busty, which seemed to be exactly what most guys he knew liked. Bucky would definitely have admired their figures, and the soldiers they performed in front of seemed to approve. He figured, well, maybe he saw most of them as sisters. Plus, there was Peggy. He thought about her a lot. He wished she was there to talk to and to keep him company. The girls were great, mostly, but they had boyfriends and families and seemed to think that Steve spent his down time with the real soldiers, so they didn’t include him in most of their off-duty plans. Peggy would have made time to talk to him - well, she probably would have rolled her eyes at his feeling sorry for himself and put him to work - but he couldn't figure out how to even begin to picture kissing her, much less anything else.

 

He did end up taking a bit of a tumble with one of the USO girls. She was a pretty red head named Doreen, and she was sweet and lonesome and flirted with him gently. She had a guy off fighting, but it was nothing serious between Steve and Doreen. They both agreed to that going in. She ended up having to leave for home after she broke her ankle during a show rehearsal one night, and they parted amiably. Steve thought it had been..nice. It was fun enough, he guessed, but he didn't see why all the other guys seemed to spend so much time thinking and talking about it. 

 

He was still hung up on Peggy, so it made sense that he wasn't as interested. He was probably just a one-woman man. Devoted to his girl back home. Although, he and Peggy had never managed to get anywhere close to being able to call her “his girl,” and Peggy wouldn’t liked being called anyone’s anything.

 

Plus, his mind was on the war and frustration of not being allowed to fight, and how he hadn't heard from Bucky in months, so it made sense that it wouldn't matter too much right then.

 

And then he had reunited with Peggy and found Bucky and got to join in the fighting and thought well, maybe. Maybe now he would have some time, and could figure out how to get Peggy to date him, and maybe if he was lucky, to kiss him. That was something he could imagine, a little. She was amazing, after all, and no matter how he looked now, he knew he was still a scrawny little nerd at heart.

 

They had one kiss. One really good kiss. Peggy had pulled him in to her right before he did something suicidally stupid. Her mouth was warm and soft beneath his, and he barely had time to even think about it before he was telling her goodbye and taking a ice bath for seventy years.

 

When he woke up, he was alone. No Peggy, no Howard, no USO girls. Nothing remotely familiar. It was strange and terrifying and so damn lonely. When he lost Bucky, he thought he had known grief, but this was a new level of hell.

 

Life went on, and he got involved with the Avengers and Tony Stark and helped saved the world from Loki. At that point, he just figured he was numb. Too much had happened. He didn't have the energy to be interested in dating or sex. Natasha kept trying to hook him up with women she knew..and eventually, a few guys, but that wasn't it, either.

 

He just..wasn't interested. Female, male, whatever. He had looked it up, and information on the internet said that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (which Natasha and Sam both carefully suggested he might have) could lead to a lack of libido, but that didn't feel right either. Looking back over everything - growing up with Bucky chasing skirts and then spending so much time with the USO girls - Steve wondered if he had never really felt anything like that. He had dreams, of course, but they had never been more than hazy pictures that left him with wet sheets. Peggy was the closest he had gotten to that _want_ that Bucky had always talked about, but what he felt for her was far different than just wanting to touch her bare skin. The counselor that Sam conned him into seeing had said he had Peggy on a pedestal, and Steve guessed that was true. But she was still the woman he loved - then, as well as now - even if he had never spent time fantasizing about her like that.

 

Maybe he was really was just broken. It had to be something so broken with him that the serum couldn't fix it - even though it had fixed everything else.

 

It wasn't something he felt he could mention to Natasha - he figured she'd think he was just trying to get out of another date. He didn't even know how to go about starting a conversation about sex with Sam - they talked about many other things about Steve's former life, but that wasn't a subject Steve was comfortable bringing up. 

 

Besides, it really didn't bother him often. Sure, he felt like he couldn't go out into public alone without being approached by some very forward dames, and that got uncomfortable very quickly. And he couldn't participate in some of the talk that the soldiers down at Sam's office got started, but most of them could be stopped by Steve frowning and telling them to speak respectfully. He had to get a little more forceful at one point, when a couple of guys were trying to goad him into talking about all the tail he must be getting - one of them called him a "pretty boy," and Steve wasn't sure if he was being come on to or insulted.

 

So Steve shrugged off the whole problem. He kept dodging Nat's attempts to set him up with his neighbors and his co-workers and the waitress at his favorite diner, frowned disapprovingly when other soldiers started talking about women in terms of body parts, and spent time with Sam.

 

It was fine. It didn't matter. He wasn't in a relationship where the topic of sex would even be on the table, so it didn't matter what he did or didn't want in bed.

 

It was fine. He was broken, but it was fine. He was fine.

  
END

**Author's Note:**

> ASEXUALITY DOESN'T MEAN YOU'RE BROKEN.
> 
> For geese-in-flight, because the world needs more Ace representation.  
> With thanks to Kara/magelette, for the cheerleading and handholding.


End file.
